Friday, April 25, 2014

#EdTechBridge: What can we do as a community to improve #EdTech Professional Development?

I'm continually amazed at the synergy and parallels, not to mention intersections, between the #edtechbridge community and what EdSurge is up to. Clearly, this is an exciting time to be thinking about EdTech and the importance of including all stakeholders in the process. The EdTechBridge Mission is

"to build an authentic community of EdTech Entrepreneurs (developers), Teachers, and Students with the shared goal of working together to create great EdTech products that will ultimately move education forward."

EdSurge has continued to demonstrate a genuine commitment to the same ideals through their newsletter, blog posts, and really making the rubber meet the road through the series of EdTech Summits which physically bring educators together with developers to connect and share ideas.

During our most recent #EdTechBridge chat on Wednesday night, April 23, 2014 our topic was what works well (and not so well) with EdTech in the classroom. At the end of our chats, we ask for suggestions for future chats. This week there was a resounding call for a chat dedicated to the discussion of Professional Development with regards to EdTech. Wouldn't you know... On Thursday morning, our twitter hashtag #edtechbridge had a flurry of activity of members excited to share a new post from EdSurge titled, "How Teachers are Learning: Professional Development Remix" Much attention was drawn to the very cool infographic provided...

We are very excited about our next chat. We have been in touch with EdSurge and believe they will be joining us for the chat and hopefully they will provide insight related to the report they are about to publish on PD. We are working on our list of questions right now, but also plan to reach out to our wonderful community to take action beyond the chat. We are looking to create an avenue for high quality and easily accessible Professional Development provided by members of our community of educators and developers. Are you interested in sharing your expertise and passion about EdTech with us? We sure hope so :)